Community coherence and acculturation strategies among refugee adolescents: How do they explain mental-health symptoms?

BACKGROUND: Against the backdrop of 10 years of civil war in Syria, with millions of refugees, this study aimed to explore sense of community coherence and the acculturation strategies of separation and competition as factors that might explain mental-health problems among adolescent Syrian refugees in Greece. METHODS: Data were gathered from 173 adolescents aged 13-18 (M = 15.85; SD = 1.49); female adolescents accounted for 60.7% of the sample. Participants filled out a self-reported questionnaire regarding internalizing and externalizing problems, as well as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). They were also asked about their sense of community coherence, their use of different acculturation strategies, and sociodemographic factors (i.e., gender, age, amount of time spent in the camp, and parents' education), as well as contextual factors such as exposure to war events, appraisal of danger, and whether they had received aid from various organizations. RESULTS: The female adolescents reported a stronger sense of community coherence and that they had received more aid from organizations than the male adolescents reported receiving. The male adolescents reported more externalizing problems. Exposure and appraisal of danger, as well as sense of community coherence and the use of the acculturation strategies of separation and competition all significantly explained the various mental-health problems. CONCLUSIONS: This article underscores the significance of gender, community coherence, and acculturation strategies in the prediction of mental health. It presents the results of this research in the context of the salutogenic and acculturation models.

Women in Refugee Camps: Which Coping Resources Help Them to Adapt?

: The present study aimed to explore the coping resources and mental health of women who have fled Syria to a neighboring European country. To that end, we examined the roles of sociodemographic factors, situational factors, and personal and community sense of coherence (SOC and ComSOC, respectively) in mental-health outcomes. One hundred and eleven refugee women aged 19-70 filled out self-reported questionnaires during August 2018 in a refugee camp in Greece. The questionnaires asked the participants for demographic information (i.e., age, level of education level, and time spent in the camp) and also addressed the situational factors of having received aid from various organizations, appraisal of danger during the war in Syria, and exposure to war experiences, as well as the coping resources of SOC and ComSOC. The results show that time spent in the camp, appraisal of danger, SOC, and ComSOC all play significant roles in predicting the variance of various mental-health outcomes. Together, those factors predict 56% of anxiety, 53% of depression, and 58% of somatization. SOC was also found to mediate the relationships between time spent in the camp and outcome variables, as well as the relationships between the appraisal of danger and the outcome variables. This indicates that SOC is crucial for good adaptation. These results will be discussed in light of the salutogenic theory.

Analysis of the Differential Relationship between the Perception of One's Life and Coping Resources among Three Generations of Bedouin Women.

Bedouin society has undergone rapid changes over the past decade. The younger generation of Bedouin women is better educated, which has enabled them to enter different professions, increased their incomes and elevated their social status. We examined the sense of coherence (SOC) and its components of meaningfulness, manageability and comprehensibility as well as the use of coping strategies among Bedouin women from three age groups. We also investigated the coping resources and strategies before determining the relationships between these variables in the three groups. One hundred ninety-six women participated in the study. Differences were found mostly between the oldest age group (61 years and older) and the two younger groups (21⁻40 and 41⁻60 years old). The oldest women reported less meaningfulness and used less positive reframing, planning, humor and acceptance. In terms of coping strategies, venting was used more by the youngest group whereas behavioral disengagement was used more by the oldest group. In the younger groups, SOC and its components were positively correlated with the use of coping strategies that are considered to be adaptive and with emotional support. However, the correlations between these factors were negative among the oldest group, which points to non-adaptive coping strategies used by these women. These results are discussed in light of the salutogenic, stress-appraisal and coping theories.

Shifts in Traditional Methods of Coping Among Elderly Bedouin Men.

Elderly Bedouin men in southern Israel are a unique traditional population living in remote unrecognized villages and experiencing rapid social transition, in addition to deep poverty and political tension. In this study, we aimed to explore stressful events, as self-defined by the participants, and the ways in which these men have coped with those stressful events. This study involved 12 men, aged 69⁻74, who participated in in-depth narrative interviews during which they were asked about transformative stressful events in their lives and how they had managed, understood, and utilized human capital, meaning-making, and other methods of coping. Analysis of the interviews revealed several themes: (a) the definition of stressful events within the cultural context, (b) the use of human capital to overcome those events, (c) the transformation of experience from hindsight into a didactic narrative that can be used to assign meaning to past events, which can then be passed on to the next generation, and (d) cultural transition as a catalyst for the creation of new understandings of events. This paper sheds new light on how elderly indigenous Bedouin men self-define stressful situations within a complex and unstable cultural context. This specific context, can help us to gain insight into how indigenous impoverished older men in similar contexts may self-define their stress and coping, based on the types of generalization accepted in qualitative research. The methodological contribution of this work lies in its use of narrative to culturally contextualize phenomenological meaning structures. Its theoretical contribution lies in its examination of the concept of stress within a specific cultural context.